6 prominent travel trends for 2018

February 23, 2018 by No Comments

[Wanderlust Tips January issue 2018] From a tailor-made cycling tour in Nepal to a wellness vacation in Bali or an extreme adventure in Lauterbrunnen, Wanderlust Tips has made a list of 6 most prominent trends in the 2018 New Year.

Rather than making difficult trips or following busy schedules with the main goal of discovering destinations, wellness travel directs you towards taking care of yourself, maintaining and renewing energy, as well as setting the balance both inside and outside. Besides for enjoying the scenery and exploring the culture, visitors can also consider wellness travel as a journey for the purification of body and soul.

If you are aiming for such trips but still have a passion for lands with unique cultural identity, you can consider the cycling tours promoted on the website of Intrepid Travel. “No big bus window, no iPhone screen, no maps, walls or guidebooks. Just the wind and open roads”. This trend has many similarities with the one predicted by Forbes, which is a type of travel to explore spiritual aspects including intrinsic exploration.

It is extremely great to visit a coconut shady resort in Tembok village in the north-east of Bali to enjoy rejuvenation and taste healthy food and healthy wholefoods. Or tourists can take a break at the Post Ranch Inn, a breathtaking resort on the coast of California. Besides taking yoga courses, watching the stars, travellers can experience the spa offering Shamanic rituals including experiences of edification, evocation, prophesies and spiritual rituals by the fire.

2. REMOTE LUXURY

In the traditional sense, when mentioning luxury places, people usually think of central areas, large urban areas, while remote areas are often associated with lack of facilities. However, nowadays when people are willing to spend a lot of time for travel, fully-equipped luxury resorts in isolated areas have become a trend. “Travellers are willing to travel to extreme distances to enjoy the feeling of having a small piece of this vast world to themselves” says pilotguides.com.

The glamping trend also originated as a result of this. Going to places outside of the popular travel map, you will enjoy your own moments, but be prepared to sacrifice some of the standards of luxury, or bear the inconvenience. For example, when you travel to the Annandale resort in New Zealand, with the slogan “Stay where the world cannot find you”, you can either rent a private chef or choose your own dishes, the resort will cook and preserve them in the refrigerator for you to reheat in the microwavefor whenever you are ready to eat (We Create, You Serve).

Furthermore, in Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp in Namibia, you can only travel there by chartered flights because the resort is located deep in the desert. For a glamping experience, the Hoshinoya Fuji resort in Japan is also a good choice if you would like to admire the majestic scenery of Mount Fuji each morning, experience camp fire, sleep in hammocks in the pine forest, and row on the romantic Kawaguchi Lake.

Although it is a little inconvenient, enjoying the fresh air, wonderful nature and breathtaking scenery along with the feeling of getting away from the world will make you think that it is a worthy trade-off.

3. CUSTOM-DESIGNED TOURS

Being one of the trends expected to take the throne in 2018, custom-designed tours are based on the wishes and hobbies of visitors. Forbes has also predicted that visitors would even want to participate in the tour design process, for example choosing their favourite room space or toilet paper colour. People spend money in traveling to enjoy the fun, comfort and relaxation as much as possible. However, there are tours that make you feel stressed because of unsuitable journeys and unforeseen troubles.

To avoid this at all costs, wealthy tourists do not hesitate to spend a considerable amount of money to have a tour designed exactly like how they want it. All of your personal preferences will be considered. The type of accommodation you like, the transportation you want to take, the excursions you like to include, the kinds of food and tour guides you want, Tuncan Travel will consider all of these before recommending a suitable tour.

You will no longer go on a tour in which you have to follow the schedule of other people or pass through destinations that you might find amusing too fast and then later regretting not being able to have spent more time admiring these places. In addition to Tuncan Travel, you can also consult the great offers on On The Go Tours: “Travelling at your own pace, seeing exactly the places you would love, spending as much time at each site as you wish, and staying at a hand-picked selection of accommodation to suit your taste and budgets”. Is there anything better than when you become the centre of the journey?

4. EXTREME VACATIONS

As the magnificent landscape and exotic cultures have become increasingly familiar to travellers, extreme vacations are exactly what thrills them. There are countless choices to turn a journey into a thrilling game, and a trip into a challenging adventure.

On an 11 – day trekking tour following trails of gorillas in Kibale National Park in Uganda, you will see gibbons, gorillas, elephants, and lions in their wilderness. Extreme vacations can also involve diving with sharks. You will be in a cage while the beast of the sea can swim freely, sometimes only about 30 centimetres from you.

At a tourist office in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, a poster was written: “Respect your limits”. This is a reminder as well as a warning for lovers of base-jumping – parachuting not from planes, but from a building, bridge, or cliff. At Lauterbrunnen-the sanctuary of this extreme sport-you can jump from a 1,000 – metre high cliff. In this adventurous sport, anyone who jumps improperly or makes a wrong wind direction prediction will bump into the cliff, which leads to death. No words can describe the player s feeling when jumping from such high altitudes because even if hundreds of people have died, this number can not stop people flocking here to test their limits.

A new “ innovation” for visitors who want to take their experience to a new level is heli-skiing – skiing not from available slides with guaranteed safety levels but from higher altitudes which can only be reached by helicopters.
Or if you love water rafting but do not like peaceful and predictable rapids, you can go to Futaleufu, Chile, which is called “the destroyer”. Needless to say, your emotions will be pushed to the extreme when admiring the river lying in the heart of the valley surrounded by green mountains and roaring powerfully with white foam and countless rocks underneath.

5. SUSTAINABLE TOURISM

Sustainable tourism seems to increasingly attract the attention of the community, and in particular, is gradually moving from theory to practice. As there are more alarming overcrowded tourist hotspots, and the climate change is becoming more complex, sustainable tourism is increasingly becoming the focus of society.

Many vineyards use animals instead of machinery to eliminate pests and fertilize the land. In some places such as Kayotei in Japan, Emiliana in Chile or Vergenoegd in South Africa, people use ducks. At Vergenoegd Wine Estate, twice a day, ducks are driven into vineyards to get rid of pests and leave fertilizers to fertilize the fields. Matetic Vineyard in Chile uses llamas and chickens to do this task.

Many resorts creatively produced some methods to preserve the ecosystem. Baines Camp in Botswana, for example, is built from recycled plastic cans. The tour company Jacada Travel conducts many community projects to reduce carbon emissions. Their constructive activities have helped to offset 100 % of the carbon emissions from their tours.
Singita Kruger Park applied solar energy technology in 2017, while Kenya has completely forbidden plastic bags. On the last days of 2017, the Sun reported that the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has announced seven overcrowded cities including Amsterdam (Netherlands), Dubrovnik (Croatia), Kuala Lumpur Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Macau (China), Rome (Italy), Venice (Italy) and Warsaw (Poland). The report is based on local people’s unfriendliness, degraded travel experiences, overloaded infrastructure, environmental degradation, and threats to culture and heritage.

Many destinations such as the Balearics (Spain) even try to reduce the number of returning visitors by coming back by raising taxes. Meanwhile, Barcelona and Venice prohibit the construction of hotels and shops for tourists.

6. CULINARY TOURS

It is said that the best way to get to know a new place or a new culture is to eat local foods. A meal tells us manythings about the culture, climate, geography, products, lifestyle and eating preferences of the local people. New culinary trends have been predicted by Adventure Studen Travel and Cox & Kings, the world›s oldest travel company with 250 years of experience.

It is an amazing experience to admire the beautiful scenery and enjoy the delicious food at a new destination. According to the World Food Travel Association, up to 30 % of the 170 million people in the United States chose their tours based on food-related activities such as tasting the local food in different regions of China or taking a cooking class at the foot of the Atlas Mountains.

The Dolce Vita Tour in Dolomites mountains in northern Italy will give you the chance to savor delicious Shrimp Dumplings, famous Alto Adige wines, and the best fruitcake while exploring magnificent mountain ranges and picturesque valleys.

Vietnam is also a promising land for this type of tourism because of the richness of three regions’ cuisine and the balance between food flavours. There are various cuisine tours ranging from 1-4 days to 11-12 days. Visiting traditional markets, watching indigenous people preparing food, enjoying the dishes of each region, and attending cooking classes are some of many interesting experiences that you may have on a culinary tour. Travelling to remote areas to experience elaborate healthcare travel experiences will take a lot of time, while the culinary tour is very flexible. If you have only a few hours or half a day to spend, you can choose one of the options mentioned above. If you have more time, you can discover the culinary adventure in many different regions. And tour prices are also flexible because local food like street food is quite cheap.